Bill Veeck (49 page)

Following the vote, Veeck strode back into baseball. Escorted by MacPhail, he entered the owners meeting and put on the charm: “I have not always led an exemplary life. I am not Galahad riding in on a shining white steed. I rather think of myself more as Merlin.”
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The Veeck family was delighted by his return to baseball, and his youngest children, Chris, Juliana, and Lisa, got on separate telephones and sang in unison, “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay, we got the Sox today.”
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Finally Bill Veeck was back under the arc lights. Speaking for others in
the press, Bill Gleason of the
Sun-Times
said, “I was simply amazed that they let him back for a third time.”
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At the reins of a team of investors, Veeck took control of the sinking club on December 10, 1975. He was an owner again, albeit more in name than on paper because he had given up so much of his ownership to win the vote.
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Asked by the
New York Times
what percentage of the Sox he now owned, he replied: “That's nobody's business, if you forgive me for saying so. And if you won't forgive me, it's still nobody's business.”
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Veeck's group bought the White Sox a day before the trading deadline. The Sox had made no trades because of the uncertain ownership and, coming off a next-to-last divisional finish, had many holes to fill. Within two hours of the final vote, Veeck traded 20-game winner Jim Kaat and minor-league infielder Mike Buskey to the Philadelphia Phillies for two right-handed pitchers, Dick Ruthven and Roy Thomas, and shortstop/center fielder Alan Bannister. General manager Roland Hemond had been working behind the scenes on the deal for several days.

Expediency and the sense that a great publicity opportunity beckoned inspired Veeck to set up a “trading post” in the middle of the lobby of the Diplomat Hotel during the Winter Meetings. It was manned by Veeck and Hemond, who had liberated a sign from the hotel dining room that read OPEN FOR BUSINESS to which Veeck added ANYTIME.

The trading post was in a corner of the lobby, and the two men sat in high-back leather chairs in a sunken seating area. At a glass table were five additional chairs that were constantly filled with other owners, general managers, and reporters. The pit was surrounded by a brass rail. “In the closing hours, dozens of players were traded. One player, pitcher Dick Ruthven, remained with the Sox for like 20 minutes. It was great theater. There was Veeck, sitting at a huge table ringed with phones, answering calls in rapid succession. The lobby quickly filled with guests trying to get a peek at the master at work.”
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Guests surrounded the trading post two and three deep. Men in their new leisure suits and Qiana shirts and women in their Florida resort finery looked on openmouthed as a master showman let them peak into baseball's sanctum sanctorum.

“What are they doing?” a woman asked.

“They're trading players,” her escort explained with less astonishment than the scandalized functionaries of the other teams. Commissioner Kuhn called it “gauche,” and Brewers owner Selig termed it a “meat market.”
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When the dust had settled and the trading deadline had passed, Veeck and Hemond had overseen the exchange of twentyone-players—eleven coming and eleven going, with two players traded twice—and had a new team that Veeck claimed was now 25 percent improved. In the words of Joe Durso of the
New York Times
, the trading pit had been in large part responsible for setting off one of “the fastest trading sprees in history.”
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Veeck immediately announced that imposing reliever Goose Gossage would be a starting pitcher, in part replacing Kaat. Recognizing his team's power vacuum, he also said that his first order of business back in Chicago would be to tear down the center-field fence at Comiskey Park to create the deepest center field in the American League.
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Veeck then repaired to the hotel dance floor with Mary Frances, where they proceeded to dance the night away.

In Chicago, the weekend papers reported every move made by Veeck and his party, noting with some irony that the Chicago Cubs, who like the White Sox had won just 75 games in 1975 and had tied for last place in the National League East, had come back from the Winter Meetings without having made a single trade. The
Chicago Tribune
accused Veeck and the White Sox of stealing the town right out from under the noses of the Cubs. “This is White Sox country now, and the Cubs surrendered it without firing a shot.”
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Veeck made the payments to finalize the sale and thanked all the new owners who had helped him overcome the “almost impossible obstacles” the American League had put in his way. He allowed Sox manager Chuck Tanner to go to Finley's Athletics, and brought back sixty-seven-year-old Paul Richards to manage his team. Veeck said he had chosen Richards, a close personal friend and co-owner, to manage because “this coming season is so important, I feel I have to go with people I know do well.”
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On December 23, 1975, two weeks after the Winter Meetings, a seventy-year-old
arbitrator and former fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Peter Seitz, ruled that baseball's reserve clause was invalid. In one unexpected moment, the game of baseball at the major-league level was turned upside down. Two players, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, had rejected the option years of their contracts, playing without a contract in 1975 in the hope that they would become free agents and able to sign with any team they chose. Their teams' owners had disagreed, insisting that in the absence of a new contract, the earlier contracts were still binding. The players submitted their case to Major League Baseball (MLB) for arbitration, and at the end of the season the case was assigned to Seitz, who had been retained by baseball for such matters. Seitz ruled in favor of Messersmith and McNally. In practical terms, what the decision meant was that any player who did not sign a contract in 1975 yet played under his 1974 terms would become a free agent in 1976.

When Seitz issued his ruling in favor of the players, he was fired on the spot. “Every arbitrator is terminated,” Seitz said later at his own press conference. “It's expected because somebody wins and somebody loses. But I've never been terminated this way—two minutes after the order, I'm gone.”

Christmas Day was dominated by news of the decision, with Seitz placed in the role of Santa or Scrooge, depending on which side of a paycheck one sat. A few writers sided with the owners, most notably Dick Young of the New York
Daily News
; he called Seitz a man with a Napoleon complex who had challenged the Supreme Court, which had upheld baseball's monopoly. Red Smith of the
New York Times
, however, hailed the decision, noting that Seitz had long before warned MLB that it needed to negotiate working conditions with the players, including the reserve clause.

The path blazed by Curt Flood that had started in 1969 with strong support from Bill Veeck had finally reached its end thanks to Messersmith and McNally. Veeck's initial reaction to the Seitz decision was measured. He felt it was presumptuous on Seitz's part to change the entire structure of the game, but since it had happened, he hoped both sides could sit down and find a permanent solution. He did not think the ruling would cause a mass exodus of players to greener pastures. Veeck's muted response may have had less to do with his true feelings than with the reality of the situation in which he found himself at the time: attempting to build a new team with some players whose contracts would lapse within a week. The team was undercapitalized and he was dependent on his salary of $65,000 a year, so
Veeck was ill prepared for the bidding wars that he knew were likely in the offing.
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To Veeck, baseball at that moment became a game “for men with unbridled egos, exceedingly wealthy men who do not want to endure the whips and lashes of outraged vanity at the tennis club and the bathhouse.”
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Commissioner Bowie Kuhn took a week to weigh in, predicting the ruination of baseball through bankruptcies, sharp retrenchment of franchises, and “great dissatisfaction among the players themselves as the money gravitates to the top—to the superstars at the expense of the majority of players.” He warned that the minor leagues—140 clubs that had provided entertainment for 12 million fans during the 1975 season—might soon be a casualty of the decision. Without the reserve clause, baseball could become chaotic and lose its position as a major sport.
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Kuhn had “not been thrilled” when Veeck appeared as a witness for Curt Flood against the reserve system, and ironically saw Seitz's decision as a “a kind of justice,” with Veeck now inheriting free agency as an owner. Nobody had done better under the old system than Veeck. “I don't think anybody's ever been dissatisfied coming out of the office after talking contract with Bill Veeck,” said former Cleveland Indian Bob Lemon, looking back to the era before free agency, pointing out that with Veeck the lesson was simple: “I make money, you make money.”
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The free agency era he had helped instigate had the potential to overturn that rational attitude.

Baseball challenged the Seitz decision in the courts, though its case was weakened by having agreed to binding arbitration conducted by a man of its own choosing. The first court immediately threw out the challenge, and while the appeal continued, the only feasible option appeared to be negotiating with Marvin Miller and the players union. The long-feared new day had dawned.

At the January 10, 1976, meeting of the Chicago chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, Veeck introduced a “mystery guest,” who turned out to be his new coach—Minnie Miñoso, returning to the White Sox for the third time. Soon after, with a blizzard swirling outside, Veeck announced at a luncheon that he had rehired Harry Caray as the team's announcer.
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Veeck brushed aside Caray's vilification of almost every as
pect of the White Sox' 1975 operation: “We don't need a house dog as our announcer. I think Caray is too great an asset to leave the city, particularly since the White Sox need assets. He is not always kindly, but is never dull.”
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Veeck then assembled an impromptu touring company, including Caray, that would travel through Illinois and Indiana in late January, drumming up interest and advance ticket sales for the 1976 White Sox. The group included Veeck's son Mike, then twenty-four and experiencing the front office as a young man, as had his father; the team's longtime traveling secretary, Don Unferth; general manager Roland Hemond; and two players, Rich Gossage and the as yet unsigned Ralph Garr, who had come to an unwritten agreement to be the Sox' designated hitter. The two White Sox were “dazzled by the whole thing.” The group began in Rockford with radio and television interviews and then moved on to such stops as a combined Optimist and Rotary luncheon in Rock Island, which drew more than 1,000; a father-son sports banquet for 600 in Peoria; a large luncheon in Champaign; a media junket in Joliet; and a tour-ending event in South Bend, Indiana.

Veeck gave much the same presentation in all venues, indulging in the quip “Anytime that we had this many for the Browns, we would play a doubleheader.” He also used the tour to take jabs at Oakland Athletics owner Charles Finley: “I can't divulge any of my 1,500 or 1,600 promotion ideas because Finley might use them.” He even challenged Finley's claim to be the originator of the orange baseball, saying, “My daddy tried the orange baseball when he was with the Cubs back in 1927 or '28.”

But his big guns were trained on the reserve clause, which he deemed “indefensible both legally and morally.” At every stop, he invoked the name that still caused his fellow owners to wince: “When I testified five or six years ago on Curt Flood's behalf, the rest of the owners had a pretty good idea of where I stood. And when Mr. [Lee] MacPhail finally got around to reading my testimony the other day, he probably learned that I tried to tell
baseball executives to sit down and work on a modified reserve clause rather than to have one shoved down their throat.”

There would be a pause and a wink, followed by a line he loved to deliver: “I've always felt that when most owners stick their heads in the sand, their brains are still showing.” He felt that a negotiated settlement with the players was the answer, rather than fighting the Seitz decision in court. “I find Marvin Miller a reasonable man, and highly intelligent.”
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Veeck, who usually shied away from free tickets, made large exceptions to get people going back to the South Side for baseball. In early February, a telethon for cerebral palsy went off the air because of a power failure. Veeck had pledged 10,000 White Sox tickets, but he immediately upped the offer to 12,000 because of the power failure. When he later heard the charity would lose about $250,000, he gave it 25,000 tickets, which he predicted would put about $100,000 in its till.
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The same day as the telethon, February 6, 1976, a U.S. District Court judge in Kansas City upheld the Seitz decision, once again pointing out that the courts were not in the business of undermining labor disputes settled by a formal process of arbitration. It was clear even to the most intractable owner that the courts were not going to help, and the only resolution had to come from negotiation with the Players Union.
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Reaction to the ruling was varied. Finley was determined to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, citing the reserve clause as sacred and himself as opposed to modifications that “would wreck the game like basketball and football are being wrecked.” Perhaps the most surprising reaction came from Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, who was as unperturbed as Veeck. He “was the only owner who never has worried about the reserve clause,” reasoning that he did not want a reserve clause to bind a player to him. “I've always felt that if a man doesn't want to work for you, he isn't going to do a good job.”
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